In his recent State of the Union, Obama made many bold statements which people have said were “progressive” and hopeful. These include: his support for paid sick leave for American workers, a pathetic increase of the minimum wage to $10.10, meant to hurt the ‘Fight for $15’ movement; a promise to veto legislation that overturns deficient Wall Street “reform;” support for “affordable” quality childcare; minimal raises in taxes for the wealthy, which isn’t nearly enough; sorta free community college [1]; supposedly protecting “a free and open Internet,” and so on.

Obama also made a number of ‘firsts’ by mentioning transgender and lesbian people in his State of the Union, claiming that the United States government protects them (oh really), which seems great but ignores the fact that not only is Obama “a born again” evangelical Christian, but he has, during his presidency, allowed federal money to fund groups that supported the anti-gay bill in Uganda and “conservative faith-based groups affiliated with the Family Research Council, anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers and an entire network of evangelical abstinence-only educators,” according to an exhaustive investigation in The Nation.

It is important to focus on other parts of the speech, often missed by other analysis, which emphasize American exceptionalism [3], including a section where he hypocritically criticizes Russia for actions that the US has done in the past:

I grew up in the Toronto District School Board being able to complete the square, calculate the hypotenuse and most importantly, conjugate irregular French verbs. Armed with these life-affirming skills, I ran headlong into adulthood confident that I’d be able to slice and dice anything life threw me, Fruit Ninja-style.

I was taught that what awaited me, was what awaited other creatures of a grandly designed natural order: a meritocracy that would reward hard workers and solvers of x. And hadn’t I seen it in my own family of 1980s Vietnamese boat refugees who had foregone welfare and worked their way up in Canadian society? Freedom and rights, democracy, and capitalism, I learned were the foundational pillars that made the society that I knew, great.

What took me decades to figure out was that capitalism was the one pillar most often #$%&ed with by a bunch of guys not elected by any citizenry. After the damage was done I realized that, as a population, we’re not taught about the Rube Goldberg-esque mechanisms of the global economy. We have been content to outsource that thinking to academics, regulators and government consultants — who often work in parallel for investment banks or hedge funds (i.e. institutional gamblers of our money). This conflict of interest isn’t something we’re even aware that we should question.